Two days ago, Bart told me he was going to touch up on his existing tattoos. It is not unusual.
When he got home he not only got the touch-ups but a whole new tattoo.
This new tattoo is approximately 8 inches long – starting at her neck and working your way down to the middle of her chest. It wasn’t the tattoo that shocked me, but the placement of it.
The tattoos on his arm never bothered me. But I cried for hours the first night he got his new one.
Bart asked if we could talk about it, but I knew I would react in a way that wasn’t going to be positive for the relationship, so I just said, “I can’t talk about this yet.”
I am now on the third day and my feelings about it have not changed. I am still visibly upset.
I know it’s permanent. I’m just going to have to get over it, but I don’t know how to explain my feelings to my husband because I have a hard time understanding them.
I know if he had had this tattoo when I met him I would never have gone on the first date – I just find him so unappealing.
At the moment, I don’t want him to touch me, and we hardly speak to each other. My husband is a very vain man. I know I hurt his pride / ego with my reaction to this.
Tearful: You say you don’t want to hurt your husband’s ego (you’re not in charge of protecting and calming his ego, for that matter), but, if that’s your goal, then days of silence punctuated crying will be worse for him, his ego, and your relationship than the truth.
It’s his body. He has the right to decorate it. But the problem with a tattoo on the neck and along the breastbone is that other people will look at it more often than it does. And you, no doubt, will see it more often than anyone else.
So tell him, “I don’t really know why this upset me so much, but it’s the placement of this one that triggers my emotions.”
I could guess that the presence of the ink so close to his pulsating chinstrap, heart, and lungs might remind you that this physically brave man (whose job it is to save people, after all), is actually extremely vulnerable.
You are also vulnerable – and it’s time to be honest about it.
Dear Amy: In a supermarket, if the checkout lane has two positions in one aisle of each other, and only one position is occupied, the line is formed for that position.
If the second position subsequently opens, should all clients stay in the original single row – or is it okay for some clients to filter and form a second row for the newly opened position?
Asking yourself: Forgive my presumption, but I guess you could be one of my out-of-the-way Canadian readers because, well, it’s hard to imagine an American standing in a full line when there was a cashier available adjacent.
To answer your question (and this exact scenario happened to me yesterday), several times a cashier opening up will say, “I’m going to take the next customer here …” and the next person in the original line will change positions and start a new queue.
Sometimes the last person in the original line rushes to take the first slot in the new queue, but that’s bad form.
Dear Amy: “Grieving” wrote to you, saying that their daughter had separated, due to a confusion over the timing of the funeral, which the daughter had missed.
Has it come to this? Will family members go into full separation on a relatively minor issue?
Disappointed: My theory is that – like many other family dynamics – estrangement is actually quite complicated.
2021 by Amy Dickinson distributed by Tribune Content Agency
